Abstract

The labour market in Serbia has undergone major changes in the past decade, partly due the privatization and company restructuring. Namely, during the time of implementation intensive privatization and restructuring processes in Serbia the increase of unemployment, and decrease of employment has been rec‐ orded. Generally observed, effects of firms’ privatizations and restructurings per‐ formed up to now in Serbia, besides certain results, are unsatisfying, particularly in terms of job losing and unemployment growth. However it is difficult to separate with certainty the impact of privatization and restructuring on employment and unemployment trends. The conducted analysis suggests that trends of employment and unemployment have been undoubtedly influenced by the privatization and company restructuring, but as well as a certain number of other factors, first and foremost in the last years by the negative effects of the world financial crisis and by the lowering of active population due to way of solving problems of redundant persons. Furthermore, the social programs in companies undergoing privatization and restructuring have been inefficient in terms of new employment of laid‐off employees. The result is that despite spending millions of dinars, Serbia has failed to gain satisfactory result in fight with the unemployment. Instead, unemployment and no active population grew considerably